MOST OF Europe’s silent-era films have been lost to posterity, a new report estimates.
As the European authorities try to stimulate debate about the preservation of modern movies, they say “digitally born” films could meet the same fate unless action is taken to make it easier to archive and access them.
“Eighty per cent of silent films are estimated to be lost,” said the report for EU digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes.
“In order to ensure that the European film heritage is passed down to future generations, it has to be systematically collected, catalogued, preserved and restored.”
Thomas Koerber, a film archive curator in a Berlin museum of film and television, believes tens of thousands of Europe’s silent movies cannot be traced.
This includes early work by pioneering directors such as Fritz Lang and FW Murnau.
“All of their early films are gone and there’s no way of knowing what they were like,” says Mr Koerber.
Vienna-born Lang was maker of the 1927 epic Metropolis, one of the most celebrated films in cinema history.
He was a forerunner of better-known giants: early in his career, Alfred Hitchcock was called "the English Fritz Lang". Murnau, a German, remains one of cinema's most influential directors. His work includes Nosferatu the Vampyre(1922), a film whose story was so close to Bram Stoker's Draculathat Stoker's widow went to court with an unsuccessful claim to have it suppressed and destroyed.
The loss of silent movies was not confined to Europe and most American films from the same era have also disappeared, Mr Koerber says.
“It’s universal. It has to do with the fact that there were no archives,” he said.
“It’s a fact of life. People don’t keep things. They get lost. It’s not only true for silent movies. The early 1930s is very bad because it was before the first archiving.
“The early 1950s is a problem period because not everything was well organised, for obvious reasons.”
Research cited in Ms Kroes’s report says the biggest cause of the disappearance of silent movies was systematic destruction by studios, who feared piracy and considered films to be of little value beyond their theatrical run.
Neither did studios want to bear the expense of storing nitrate, the standard film stock until the introduction of acetate-based film in 1949.
Nitrate film was susceptible to fire – and decomposed if not stored in the right conditions.
Ms Kroes said digital technology can help rescue Europe’s “fragile” film heritage, adding that the preservation process needed to be improved to achieve optimum results.
Legal issues and administrative costs prevented the full exploitation of films and related material for educational and cultural use, she said.
But digital archiving is expensive. Mr Koerber suggests it would cost €500 – €600 million to save the entire backlog of German film and television, and as much as $2 billion (€1.58 billion) to safely secure the backlog of global film.
“That’s high enough to deter anyone from thinking further about it.”